🚌 A public transit alternative

The Hustle

August 18, 2023

Plus: Weekend Reads, Harrison Ford’s new snake, leadership tips, small adventures, and more.

Dutch startup BeerMate raised $1.5m for its automatic beer-serving machines to alleviate one of humanity’s greatest troubles — long drink lines at live events — by serving up to four beers within 10 seconds. Fittingly, a music festival founder named Michiel Beers is a lead investor.

In today’s email:

Child influencers: Not paying them is illegal (in Illinois, anyway).
Ride your luck: On-demand public transit is trending up.
Weekend Reads: For your not-entirely-lazy Sunday.
Around the Web: Just a little adventure, 17 leadership principles to transform your team, birds with moves, and more.

👇 Listen: It’s bad parenting to put your kids in your content. Now it’s bad business, too.

The big idea

Illinois law makes parents pay child influencers

Child influencers can make bank. Illinois is making sure they see some of that cash.

2023-08-18T00:00:00Z

Juliet Bennett Ryla

The egg crack challenge has “momfluencers” smashing eggs on their kids’ heads. Some children seem perplexed or amused; others break down in tears, sparking heated debate.

Since the advent of the internet, parents have been exploiting their kids for likes. Now, they’re gonna have to pay up in Illinois.

No child works for free

Because children under 13 aren’t permitted to have social media accounts — nor can they open bank accounts or sign sponsorship contracts — parents typically run the show.

Illinois’ changes to its Child Labor Law will allow people 18+ to sue if they weren’t properly compensated for content they appeared in as children, per CNN.

Qualifying content must earn at least 10 cents per view, and the child must appear in at least 30% of the account’s content over a 30-day period.
Parents must put 50% of earnings into a trust fund based on the percentage of time the child appears in the video.
So, if a child appeared in 50% of a video, they’d receive 25% of earnings.

States including California and Washington have proposed similar laws, but Illinois is the first. Some states do have laws to protect child actors, like California’s Coogan Law.

Child influencing can be lucrative

Eleven-year-old YouTuber Ryan Kaji earned his family $25m+ in 2020.
Twin toddlers Taytum and Oakley Fisher earn $10k-$20k per sponsored post, per The New York Times.

But it can also be harmful

A psychiatrist told Newsweek that embarrassing your children online can negatively impact their mental health. (This was in an article about parents throwing cheese on their kids, BTW.)

Teen Vogue interviewed a teen whose entire childhood was posted online. When she expressed wanting to stop, her parents claimed they’d have to sell their house and wouldn’t have money for “nice things.” She is waiting to turn 18 to speak out and may go no-contact with her parents.

Fun fact: Coogan Law is named for Jackie Coogan, who sued his mother for squandering his earnings from his childhood acting career. Later in life, Coogan played Uncle Fester in “The Addams Family.”

TRENDING

Indiana Jones famously hates snakes. Harrison Ford does not, and is honored to have a new Peruvian species named after him: the Tachymenoides harrisonfordi. “The snake’s got eyes you can drown in, and he spends most of the day sunning himself by a pool of dirty water — we probably would’ve been friends in the early ‘60s,” the actor said.

SNIPPETS

The Associated Press, which has a licensing agreement with ChatGPT, published its standards for AI use, including not altering media or using ChatGPT to produce “publishable content.”

Linus Tech Tips, a popular tech review YouTube channel with 15.5m subscribers, will pause amid allegations of shoddy testing and sexual harassment.

Blue Shield of California tapped Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drug Co. and Amazon Pharmacy to save on patient costs. CVS isn’t entirely out, but its stock dropped ~9% Thursday morning.

NYC banned TikTok on government devices effective immediately, in accordance with New York state, Ohio, and Texas, among others.

Burger bucks: In-N-Out owner Lynsi Snyder claims that the average In-N-Out manager makes $180k+/year, including store profit-sharing. The average fast-food manager makes ~$63.8k.

Instacart karma: Gig workers are marking “tip baiters” — people who reduce tips after deliveries are completed — on Google Maps to warn their colleagues.

Streaming now: See how G2 became a unicorn in this short documentary following CEO and co-founder Godard Abel.

Chart

Olivia Heller

Expanding public transit, but making it more like Uber

With apologies to PB&J and Ben & Jerry’s, we can think of no duo more iconic than living in a city and spending half your day sitting in traffic.

Getting around any city is hard — and it only gets harder without a car.

Don’t even get us started on living in the countryside or deep in the suburbs without one. That sounds nearly impossible.

For the many millions of people living this reality, there may be buses that can deliver them where they need to go, but chances are it’s infrequent and indirect.

This is why demand-response transport (DRT) is having a moment.

What’s DRT?

A convenient alternative to traditional public transport systems. Rather than relying on a set route and schedule, DRT users can hail a bus via an app when they need it and share the journey with others going in the same direction, UberPool style.

DRT is on the rise. There are 200 active DRT projects in the US right now — up from zero ~10 years ago. Industry expert Lukas Foljanty told Trends that 700+ new projects have been launched globally since the start of 2020.

Local governments are switching to on-demand because it can:

Improve access in nonurban areas
Reduce emissions and traffic by replacing cars
Connect people with disabilities to the transport network
Help transport systems keep up with erratic post-pandemic commuting habits

Who’s helping them make the switch?

Software companies like Via and Liftango are moving DRT forward:

Via, a digital platform used in ~300 DRT projects — including ones with universities like Harvard, Northwestern, and NYU — has raised $887m.
Liftango modeled out DRT improvements to Auckland, New Zealand’s public transit system, helping them optimize resources. (Specifically, driving a 14% increase in ridership while reducing operating costs).

Want to get in on this emerging space? Join our pals over at Trends — they’ll loop you in on the best opportunities.

Listen Now

The business of hip-hop (ft. the founder of Trapital)

Hip-hop has always been more of a movement than just music. And rappers have always been more like entrepreneurs than just artists. Yet, only one LinkedIn Top Voice has spent the last few years decoding the moves of these moguls.

That man is Dan Runcie — who, to celebrate hip-hop turning 50 (no pun intended), joined us to sum up the business of hip-hop.

From early legends like Sugar Hill Gang and Run-DMC, to modern icons like Jay-Z and Drake, the genre’s superstars have influenced the flow of fashion, media, and culture as we know it.

This mashup of The Hustle Daily Show x Trapital just makes sense. (Hit the big red balloon below, then pass it to a friend.)

50 years of hip-hop 🎈 →

weekend reads

Welcome to Weekend Reads

In case you missed ‘em, here’s this week’s best…

Tweet: On the internet, nobody knows you’re dead inside.
Blog: Want to have your cake and eat it too? Corporate entrepreneurship combines the rush of startup culture with the security of a larger corporation.
Chart: Storage company profits and stocks have cooled from covid-fueled peaks, but are still beating the rest of the S&P 500.
Story: Papantla, Veracruz, is the birthplace of vanilla and home to some of the world’s best beans. So why are they so easy to steal?
Video: This look inside the Joy ice-cream cone empire — responsible for an astounding ~70% of cones consumed in the US — is a real treat. But fair warning: you’re gonna want ice cream after watching it.

AROUND THE WEB

🔭 On this day: In 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen observed helium during a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately, scientists believed neither Janssen nor English astronomer Joseph Norman Lockyer, who also spotted helium, for another 30 years.

🧠 Cure boredom: With this random trivia generator.

🚀 Blog: These 17 leadership principles will help managers transform their teams.

🌲 That’s cool: Scroll for “A Tiny Adventure.”

🐦 Aww: These birds can groove.

SHOWER THOUGHTS

Powerball winners are the heaviest taxed billionaires in the world. SOURCE
SOURCE
Lowballing is almost always frowned upon, except when guessing a 30+ person’s age. SOURCE
SOURCE
There is no reason for baby clothing to have pockets. SOURCE
SOURCE
Visiting Times Square feels like going to a dodgy website without ad blockers. SOURCE
SOURCE
There’s an extremely small chance that your dryer will finish its cycle having perfectly folded your laundry. SOURCE
SOURCE

via Reddit

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Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah.
Editing by: Ben “Refuses to ever use the word ‘kidfluencerr” Berkley.

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